Anna Hazare’s Crusade: Blustering Provincialism
Or A Revitalization Of The Constitution Of India ?
By Dr. Nyla Ali Khan
23 August, 2011
Countercurrents.org
Insurgency, counter insurgency, custodial disappearances, custodial deaths, abandoned half-widows, destitute widows, impoverished orphans, flawed institutions, unaccountability in political and bureaucratic offices, tenuous infrastructure, rife unemployment, languishing prisoners, a bankrupt state exchequer, and a civil society that is gasping for air. Is that the Kashmir that our ancestors fought tooth and nail for? Is that the Kashmir for which our previous generations sacrificed their youths, their comforts, their lives? Will the toll that the past two decades have taken on the lives of the people of Jammu and Kashmir be brushed aside in a bid to integrate the State even further into the Indian Union?
I have been reading about the hoopla generated by Anna Hazare and his cohort. I have been watching the hullabaloo on Indian television surrounding Anna’s “Gandhian” means of protest against the rampant corruption in the Indian polity, the Indian bureaucracy, and Indian society. The fanfare that Anna’s media savvy team has efficiently roused up to bolster his tenacious demands is being blown out of all reasonable proportion by the anchors/ commentators/ media celebrities, right-wing personages, and politicians who cannot boast of having any substantive politics. It is amusing to watch right-wing commentators on television, whose belligerence, blustering and rhetoric vis-à-vis Kashmir is repulsive, take up Anna’s cause with gusto. Indian parliamentarians, who, time and again, have failed to invigorate the very well written Constitution of India with the dignity and vigour that it deserves, are screaming themselves hoarse about the supremacy of parliamentary democracy. A crude translation of that would be that they are worried about the loss of their privileges, the maintenance of which doesn’t require much work. It is greatly troubling that the Indian legal system cannot prevent the nomination of a dubious Head of State for the position of Prime Minister of India, one who has been accused by lakhs of people of orchestrating a pogrom in his State. Lack of corroborating evidence! Hail parliamentary democracy!
Much as I admire the determination and perseverance of 74 year old Anna Hazare to go the whole hog by undertaking an “indefinite” fast, I cannot help wondering at his politics. Are Anna and his team validating the culture of the Congress by asserting that the only two personages Anna is willing to negotiate with are Prime Minister Singh and Rahul Gandhi? Last I heard, Rahul Gandhi was the scion of the Gandhi dynasty and the General Secretary of the Congress. When did his position or credibility supersede that of the Union Minister for Home Affairs of the Republic of India? All I can say is that Chidambaram is in for a tough fight. I just recalled that another personage Anna considers worth his while to talk with is the Chief Minister of Maharashtra, Prithviraj Chauhan. Perhaps the ethnic, regional, and linguistic commonalities between Chauhan and Anna would facilitate the mammoth task of speaking for a gigantic nuclear power, India. Also, is Anna, in the frenzy of his crusade, forgetting that India is a country riven by caste, class, regional and political divides? The diversity of this country cannot thrive on facile attempts to create the homogeneous category of “Indian.” Nor can it thrive on dubious attempts to gloss over xenophobic provincialism or a highly culpable state-sponsored marginalization of a minority community. The increasing communalization of Indian politics is a juggernaut that annihilates the myth of secularism in India.
The Constitution of India seeks to guarantee respect for the rule of law, the independence of the judiciary, and the integrity of the electoral process. But time and again, provisions of the Constitution of India have been flagrantly violated in Kashmir, and the ideals that it enshrines have been forgotten. In Kashmir, rights relating to life, liberty, dignity of the people, and freedom of expression guaranteed by the Constitution, embodied in the fundamental covenants and enforceable by courts of law, have been gravely violated. The much lauded parliamentary democracy in India has been unable to protect a genuine democratic set-up in Kashmir. The Government of India cannot continue to install Heads of State in Jammu and Kashmir, and claim that it is not plutocratic. The non-governance in Jammu and Kashmir, and the growing disconnect between the rulers and the ruled in the State seem to have lulled the Government of India into further apathy. Heads of States, particularly of trouble-torn ones cannot avoid their ethical and moral responsibilities towards the peoples of the States by letting their lives be torn asunder by paramilitary forces and other “upholders” of the law.
A dozen or more summit conferences have been held between the government heads of India and Pakistan toward the resolution of the Kashmir problem, from Nehru-Liaquat to Vajpayee-Musharraf meetings, laced in between with Soviet-American interventions, but nothing worth reporting was ever achieved, primarily because the people of J & K were never made a part of these parleys. The only silver lining to this huge cloud of failures was the signing of the 1952 Delhi Agreement, signed between two elected prime ministers, Nehru and Abdullah. It is high time that the 1952 Delhi Agreement is returned to in letter and spirit, or else I am afraid that we may some day be surprised into a UN ordered referendum as in East Timor and South Sudan. Kashmir needs an Anna Hazare with a broader vision and a greater understanding of the chapter on fundamental rights in the Constitution of India.
Dr. Nyla Ali Khan is Visiting Professor Department of English , University of Oklahoma
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